and surely come a man, a big brolic guy, see me as pretty as I'm looking at you. come all the way down that ditch
bank kept looking at the man who was looking in the ditch just like there's somebody in
there ditching you know how a man would walk could you imagine a man two men in
a ditching a'ditching and a man walking down the side of that ditch looking at them
in there throwing that dirt ....in here to buy milk I knew it couldn't be the one but one runner coming in to my place in southeastern North Carolina not far
from the largest interstate highway on the East Coast the Lumbee River winds
through a rich countryside by pastures and fields through swamplands and dense
forests this landscape is the homeland of the largest Indian tribe east of the
Mississippi, the people to whom the river lends its name the Lumbee. the unique
character of Lumbee community and culture is expressed in a distinctive
use of the English language and in a mistakable manner of speech. you can cut a tree for wood. I would...dry out to save your life. he'll lay right down and rot. and you know the times you can cut it, in three days time, you can make a barn. do you think that the Lumbees talk different from us folks? yep we have our own language. I went with a friend to church to see a Christmas play last year and this white gentleman who was from
Hamlet or Rockingham went with us and he thought the preacher was speaking in
tongues and he was actually speaking in Lum. over 40,000 Lumbee live in Robeson
County North Carolina the small town of Pembroke is the economic and educational
center for the many Lumbee communities in the county and the heart of Lumbee
culture we have several different distinct Indian communities here in the
county but you have Prospect Union Chapel deep branch back swamp bear swamp
all these little areas surround Pembroke Pembroke is pretty new it's only formed
around 18 late 1800s but it was mainly settled by white folks and then the
Indian people started coming in and as the university grew we got more
education then we started our own businesses and then it became as a hub
of Indian activity an All Indian Normal School was
established here in 1887 giving rise to the nation's first state-supported
four-year college for Native Americans in 1941 later to become the University
of North Carolina at Pembroke formally recognized by the state of North
Carolina in 1885 the Lumbee tribe has yet to receive full recognition from the
United States government the cloudy history of Robeson County raises many
questions about the influences that contributed to the Lumbee culture
although these questions are typically of more concern to outside scholars than
to the Indians of Robeson County themselves we had had a long
conversation and we were talking and talking and I thought the guy was pretty
cool you know I thought it was a I was giving him credit for being an intellect
there for a few minutes until he turned out to be idiot you know and he was like
gonna insist no matter what I would say he was trying to well you know,
paraphrase it you know what he wanted to say he had his preconceived
notion when he came to Robeson County and finally I just got tired of it and I
told him I said look we know who we are you know we know we have always known
y'all are the ones who are trying to identify something Americans in general have a stereotype of Lumbees as they do of Native Americans and
Americans generally expect Native Americans all to look the same way into
act the same way like we do with all other human beings human groups and it
just doesn't hold up none of the categories will work if there were a
surviving whole traditional language here it would be an easier case to make
especially to other native groups who do have survived in traditional languages
it'd be an easier case to make for Lumbees being recognized fully by the federal government well the Lumbees have lost
whatever tribal language they once had but I still think that we have an
identifying way of speaking that makes us different from any other group in the
area and I think that that collective way of speaking is part of our our
identity and it reflects the way that we communicate with ourselves one of the
great mysteries about the Lumbee is their ancestral language tradition what language did they once speak? when did they lose their native language?
are there any traces of their native language left? the present location of
the Lumbee has made it more difficult to identify the roots of Lumbee speech
patterns Robeson County North Carolina is located in a transitional Native
American region where three Native American language groups have been a
significant presence Siouan languages were spoken by Siouan tribes throughout
the area. to the west and north were groups of Iroquoian speaking tribes
such as the Cherokee and Tuscarora. to the east and on the Outer Banks
there were Algonquian-speaking tribes all of these language groups were in an
area that may have influenced the native language once spoken by the Lumbee today the Lumbee are balanced between a
necessary engagement with modern life and the call to understand their
ancestral history many of the Lumbee people seek to reconnect with a range of
Native American tradition we've lost a lot of our Indian identity you know over the
years and I think this is good for to have to make people aware that the
Native Americans here in Robeson County a lot of the things we gave up we gave up
for survival what is today we go to work so we can survive you know and we make
changes in our lives so we can survive so our people had to do that but I think
rather than just giving up the language or whatever we took English and
corrupted it to make it our own. Lumbee English may have been influenced by a
number of different groups beginning with the very first English-speaking
colonists in the area the earliest English colonists landed on the Outer
Banks in the late 1500s scholars once speculated that the Lumbee were
descendants of the Lost Colony the group of English settlers who vanished from
Roanoke Island around 1587 there's no doubt about it there are a lot of
similarities between Outer Banks English and Lumbee English for example the
pronunciation of words like tide is toid you can hear among older people in Prospect you can also hear on the Outer Banks also words like mommuck and
toten are found in both places and then you hear grammatical constructions such
as I weren't there in the Outer Banks and also in Lumbee English but it's a
stretch to say that this proves that there's a connection between Lumbee
English and Lost Colony English what is probably more likely is the fact that
there was an earlier English that because of isolation fueled the English
that developed in the Outer Banks and Lumbee English as well while the English colonies gradually migrated inland the movement of Scottish settlers
up the Cape Fear River and into the Robeson County area was another likely
influence on the development of Lumbee English a third possible influence came
from Scots-Irish settlers who migrated south down the Appalachian mountain
range and East into the Piedmont from these diverse sources of English the
Lumbee carved out the unique dialect that today is strongly associated with
Lumbee culture and farming, big farms, fifteen acres of tobacco. language is very important as I talked to the reporter the other day she said well why is language so important why is there such
why does this need to be protected I said well that's how we recognize who we
are you know not only by looking at someone we notice who we are by our
language you recognize someone is from Spain because they speak Spanish or from
France because they speak French I said and that's how we recognize Lumbees if
we're anywhere in the country and hear ourselves speak we know exactly who we
are and we were there at a research conference in Miami Florida
and we're out that night and we kind of take the wrong bus or the wrong somewhere something we get lost and we get on a bus and it's about seven or eight of us I guess
together on the bus and the bus driver and this one guy sitting at the front of
the bus with a patch over his eyes and he looks like he's hungover from
something and so we're just happy-go-lucky because you know we're
just having a good time sitting at the back of the bus just talking and he
turns around just looks at us and all of us are like this and this and he's like y'all from
Robeson County aren't ya? it's like an immediate identification mechanism can I
talk to this person can I trust this person do we share common
experiences do we have a common bond even if somebody been away for years
there's something that lingers about their language that if he talks long enough you pick it up Lumbee English distinguishes itself
through vocabulary pronunciation and grammar. one of the most obvious features
of Lumbee English is vocabulary and a cup of ellick is actually shook coffee with
sugar in it you know so it's like a sweet cup of coffee a cup of ellick bring me a cup of that ellick I want some ellick. Juvember. okay that's, some folks call them slingshot but it's just what we would
take a forked branch cut it off put rubber bands on it tongue of the shoe
and make a little rock in it, well that's a Juvember. that's all ever heard until
I got grown and found out they call them slingshots or something else you know
but that's what a juvember is. to me when you mommuck something you just treat it bad you like just mess over it
you know you make a mess of it you mommuckin up them clothes? you better get all that dirt out of them and not mommuck them up. Toten is like an omen of something bad
that's going to happen or a sign of death you can see a toten or you can
hear totan many Lumbee terms are largely unknown outside of Robeson County toten? yeah to carry juvember? juvember. what's that? yeah that's
that's when you have a cold snap in July that's juvember. Ellick? name of a person? that's what it sounds like to me mommuck? not familiar with that one. mommuck? trying to act like their mama and now people around here you know around here you know they're
used to it they're part of their ancestors are part of the reason our
ancestors talked the way we did but anywhere away from this immediate area people
they know it's different they know something they've never heard
before and and a lot of time they're fascinated by cause it you know it's something different chicken and rice and rice and chicken. set you down side a good wife him and I want to try to look after fixing him a meal in high school we took grammar you know of
course everybody takes grammar and English and and a lot of the words
we use we were discouraged from using them because it wasn't proper English
according to the grammar we'd always heard teachers that would come in
outside the community would really downgrade the words that we would use
it's not proper and you'd be punished in certain cases I attended Sandhills
Community College first and there was a girl who lived in the boarding house
along with me her she was from Florida she brought her little sister and her
little sister said boy you talk funny you don't talk right why don't you
change the way you talk I said well darling you sounded as funny to me as I do
to you why don't you change the way you talk Lumbee English often goes deeper
than simple labels. many words help to define a sense of community A Lum that's
that's just lingo that's just belonging when you say you're a Lum that's
identity. and we were up at Chapel Hill the other Sunday for Oliana's graduation and they referred to the alumni as Lums. And I said how about that, we're all Lums! Lum is a Lumbee you know we refer to ourselves as Lums for me to be able to call somebody Lumbee it would be having Lumbee blood in them, having to be knowing about their culture, they got to know about their ancestors. but for people outside that know nothing about their culture, I mean they call everybody Lumbee that is Lumbee they got blood, but they know nothing about their culture. to me really I can't I mean they are
Native American but me, I really can't consider them Native American if they really didn't learn about their culture. if you maintain your community ties and stuff if it's just coming home at
Christmas and from Mother's Day and Lumbee homecoming and stuff it's got
to be something, in some kind of way mean you know this Heather Locklear
thing Heather Locklear ain't no Lum I don't care what nobody says I don't
care if her granddad, great granddaddy of what it was came from here
she's never lived as a Lum she's never been involved in this community she's
never certainly had to experience things that are just gonna be part of
your life experience if you're a Lum and you know you live in Robeson County so it's
hard for me to see someone like that as a Lum to me it's got to be you just got
to be a part of this community even if it is from a distance you know so I
guess I'm saying you got a have the genetics and the culture an important
part of the Lumbee accent is in the pronunciation which is mostly southern
with a few distinct vowel differences like the vowel in the word side or ride other language variations are
found in Lumbee grammar like the use of bes where other dialects use am is and
are another difference is the use of I'm where other dialects use I have Lumbees speakers sometimes use weren't
where other English speakers use wasn't but Lumbee dialect is more than words
and sounds it is a combination of verbal and nonverbal presentation that makes it
an extension and expression of Lumbee culture I would say that the larger
percentage of the time you could tell a Lumbee by their speech by certain words
they use or pronunciations or just a style and tone of the conversation okay
but you kind of when you spot each other you kind of look, boy that looks like a Lum over there and then when they say something you know you just know that's
gonna be something even if it's not the the sound itself it's gonna be an
expression one of the most refreshing things happened when I went to
university and I had an English teacher and she said one of the first few
sessions we had in class she said that the English or the the words that you
use it is used to communicate and if it communicates with people it's just as
right, just as proper in that context as the proper English you would expect in
Washington DC but she said that the the difference was was knowing when
to use what kind of English. I can't say that I think Lumbee should learn
standard English I think that's a preposterous assumption now if a person
wants to move in the mainstream and do the things that mainstream folk do then
it's necessary to speak a mainstream language and I think a lot of people
have worked out that accommodation people who do move in and out of the
mainstream by doing both by style shifting from one to the other I grew up
having to be bilingual because I'm bilingual now with my father's
family hope I don't offend any of them I had to speak Lumbee you know my birth
language but when I was with my mom's family I had to speak quote correct English knowing When to use the language I think is important because I was always, I
didn't want anybody laughing at me and so I learned I feel like I learned to be
able to use English outside this community in a way that people could
understand it but yet when I come home I could fit in with people at home as well well we've been schooled that standard English is the way to speak that an
educated person speaks standard English and that's kind of the way of the
world or I should say the way of society in America and I think students need to
know how to do that but I don't think that it needs to be taught at the
expense of losing the dialect that man asked me, Mr. Cornell how you doing I said I'm doing pretty good. I telling about the professor from Queens
College he said when you're dealing with business and in social settings
you need to speak quote general American English so everyone can understand you
but when you're with your family friends and at home just be yourself you know
that's the way I am and that man asked me that time, ...you getting fat? I said no my club just getting too little there's a comfort zone you know I don't
care what go this one I've been around the world couple of times there are a
lot of things it's that it's just a feeling when you're back in Robeson County you know it's like hey I can make it I'm gonna be alright what you're seeing in other tribal
communities is that you're seeing that language is being revitalized revived
and revitalized so it's a whole different angle than what we're what's
happening here in the Lumbee community because we're not talking about a
language we're essentially talking about a dialect but again it's just as
identifying I think as as a separate tribal language would be Lumbee language
is a beautiful thing it has its own style it lilts when you listen to it
when you sit in the room full of it it wraps around you it's a very warm thing in the old days we had these little close communities things like our language
could happen they had time to evolve you know and become this the state dialect
we speak now since 1887 there's been an attempt to standardize Lumbee English
and they haven't been successful so there's has to be something in terms
of it being embedded in the culture ingrained in the culture because you
would think of a hundred years of a public education that something would
have changed when in fact it hasn't Uncle Sam says we speak no native language he
says we do not live in a traditional way therefore we cannot be Indian. I say for
centuries his ancestors make speaking our native
language against the law. Made practicing our traditions punishable by him for this reason, many of our
languages had died. many of our own people know nothing of their culture and history. but the Indian blood runs thick and strong through our veins. We are Native Americans Indian by birth. with the exposure to other languages and cultures through movies
satellite television and the Internet and the greater mobility of the overall
population one wonders whether Lumbee culture and language can survive but
North American Indian cultures have been under intense outside pressures from
forces of change since the arrival of the first Europeans. the Lumbee community
continually finding refuge and strength in ties of kinship and community has
proven its ability to adapt endure and survive we can evolve once you get to the point
where our cultures can relate to each other communicate ideas to each other and
stuff like that and still maintain our own identity and I think our people done
probably the best job of that I've ever seen you know most people when they're
invaded and subordinated and oppressed and occupied whatever race you want to
call them they they generally don't make it through there
